Lifeboat Foundation

George Church is very interested in your memories now.

Harvard researcher George Church is looking for people with exceptionally good memory to take part in a study aimed at finding genetic mechanisms that boost memory in research that could one day result in better drugs or diagnostic tests.

Church and other researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project, in collaboration with Lumos Labs — the makers of the brain-training game Lumosity — will look for common genetic markers in individuals with exceptional memories, attention and reaction speeds.

Continue reading “George Church, Lumosity want those with good memory to ‘share it, not hoard it’” »

Bowles says. “We’re not changing what is in your genetic code. We’re altering what is expressed. Normally, cells do this themselves, but we are taking engineering control over these cells to tell them what to turn on and turn off.”

Now that researchers know they can do this, doctors will be able to modify the genes via an injection directly to the affected area and delay the degeneration of tissue. In the case of back pain, a patient may get a discectomy to remove part of a herniated disc to relieve the pain, but tissue near the spinal cord may continue to breakdown, leading to future pain. This method could stave off additional surgeries by stopping the tissue damage.

So far, the team has developed a virus that can deliver the gene therapy and has filed a patent on the system. They hope to proceed to human trials after collecting initial data, but Bowles believes it could be about 10 years before this method is used in patients.

Continue reading “Pain in the Neck: Using CRISPR to Prevent Tissue Damage and Neck Pain” »

I did a long-form interview on Medium’s Defiant of my run for California Governor. It covers many subjects (Trump, gene editing, basic income), as well as why I think technology is ready to change politics and governance forever:

By AJAI RAJ

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 2015, and the ever-humming machinery of American presidential politics is picking up steam. The American political machine runs on steam, okay? It’s very old.

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan Wants to Create Superpeople —Oh, and Also Be California’s Governor” »

The new research, led by nanoengineering professor Shaochen Chen, addresses one of the biggest challenges in tissue engineering: creating lifelike tissues and organs with functioning vasculature — networks of blood vessels that can transport blood, nutrients, waste and other biological materials — and do so safely when implanted inside the body.

Researchers from other labs have used different 3D printing technologies to create artificial blood vessels. But existing technologies are slow, costly and mainly produce simple structures, such as a single blood vessel — a tube, basically. These blood vessels also are not capable of integrating with the body’s own vascular system.

“Almost all tissues and organs need blood vessels to survive and work properly. This is a big bottleneck in making organ transplants, which are in high demand but in short supply,” said Chen, who leads the Nanobiomaterials, Bioprinting, and Tissue Engineering Lab at UC San Diego. “3D bioprinting organs can help bridge this gap, and our lab has taken a big step toward that goal.”

Continue reading “Nanoengineers 3D print biomimetic blood vessel networks” »

The Libertarian Republic covering my libertarian run for California Governor:

By Kody Fairfield

Continue reading “Transhumanist Wants to Run for California Governor Under Libertarian Banner” »

Inspired by origami, North Carolina State University researchers have found a way to remotely control the order in which a two-dimensional (2-D) sheet folds itself into a three-dimensional (3D) structure.

“A longstanding challenge in the field has been finding a way to control the sequence in which a 2-D sheet will fold itself into a 3D object,” says Michael Dickey, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-corresponding author of a paper describing the work. “And as anyone who has done origami — or folded their laundry—can tell you, the order in which you make the folds can be extremely important.”

Continue reading “Researchers remotely control sequence in which 2-D sheets fold into 3D structures” »

The more crops we cultivate, the less chance our food supply wil get wiped out by a disease.

Out of the more than 300,000 plant species in existence, only three species—rice, wheat, and maize—account for most of the plant matter that humans consume, partly because in the history of agriculture, mutations arose that made these crops the easiest to harvest. But with CRISPR technology, we don’t have to wait for nature to help us domesticate plants, argue researchers at the University of Copenhagen. In a Review published March 2 in Trends in Plant Science, they describe how gene editing could make, for example, wild legumes, quinoa, or amaranth, which are already sustainable and nutritious, more farmable.

“In theory, you can now take those traits that have been selected for over thousands of years of crop domestication—such as reduced bitterness and those that facilitate easy harvest—and induce those mutations in plants that have never been cultivated,” says senior author Michael Palmgren, a botanist who heads an interdisciplinary think tank called “Plants for a Changing World” at the University of Copenhagen.

Continue reading “Want more crop variety? Researchers propose using CRISPR to accelerate plant domestication” »

Em uma primeira experiência mundial, os cientistas conseguiram desenvolver um embrião artificial funcional, a partir do zero, usando dois tipos de células-tronco para construir a vida em uma placa de Petri.

As células-tronco foram cultivadas fora do corpo em uma bolha de gel, e foram capazes de se transformar em vários estágio inicial órgãos internos — assim como em um embrião regular. Os pesquisadores agora estão esperando a técnica vai resolver alguns grandes mistérios sobre os primórdios da vida.

The discovery that living and dead cockroaches have strikingly different magnetic properties could help bioengineers design new magnetic sensors.